This seminar was organised by GigaSpaces and our partner AKSAAS in conjunction with A*STAR Exploit Technologies and HP.
Besides the organisers, this event included experts and thought leaders on cloud computing and HPC from Accenture and our HK partner ClusterTech. It also included a presentation from our customer Rednano.
Nati Shalom, founder and CTO of GigaSpaces and the keynote speaker of this seminar, started off with an introduction of the benefits of the cloud, and why traditional architecture is not suited for the cloud. Then he went into how an organization can future proof their architecture with GigaSpaces, and followed that up with a live demonstration of the stock demo application on the Amazon EC2. Nothing beats our cloud-tools to reinforce the concept of unlimited scale-out on a pay-per-use model and differentiate GigaSpaces against the many others players that talks about the cloud but does not have the product to back up their claims. GigaSpaces already has a mature and easy to use product for the cloud.
Our second speaker Francis Ng, Director of Business from our HK partner ClusterTech showed the “Excel-that-Scale” solution that they are implementing for a large bank in HK. The system demonstrates how a trader can use an Excel client front end to enter trades which are submitted to a GigaSpaces compute cloud in the back end that has all the live market data feed, which performs Monte Carlo simulations using .NET PUs and returns the result to the Excel client for further manipulation by the trader. This is a classic example that demonstrates how one can build a Risk management application as a service using GigaSpaces .Net and Map/Reduce pattern to achieve the required scalabilty.
Our third speaker is Dennis Ang, General Manager of High Performance Computing from HP, reinforces the importance of an Adaptive Infrastructure as a pooled/shared resources to empower cloud services, and how IT is moving from a cost center to a revenue center. Dennis also presented HP’s scale-out portfolio offerings including a 2-in-1 blade center that packs in double the density, as well as a 40-foot container portable data center!
Our fourth speaker is Ong Whee Teck, Partner and Technology Consulting Lead of Accenture ASEAN practice, who shared with us the eight major technology trends as envisaged by the thought leaders in Accenture, with cloud computing ranking right at the top. Whee Teck also explained the four different types of cloud, the evolution of SaaS, and gave a balance opinion of why cloud computing may not be for everyone.
Our last speaker is Patrick Ng, CTO from Rednano , a premier local and directory search engine and a GigaSpaces customer. He shared with the audience the business of a search engine, their technology platform and challenges, and why he would be interested to run in a local cloud operator. On his last slide Patrick also gave the reasons why he chose GigaSpaces, including the fact that it is a stable and proven product which is ahead of the pack, and he mentioned that it took them only 2 days to migrate some of their components to run on the GigaSpaces cluster.
Overall it was a successful event with a good turnout and enthusiastic audience participation, and we will be conducting more of such events across Asia in the coming year, starting with an event in Hong Kong on Jan 15, 2009.
Watch this space!